For over two years now, our blog has featured the newest research about children, families and digital media, with contributions from our team and researchers around the world. To kick-off the beginning of this school year, we are highlighting some recent content you may have missed.

As ever, the public debate around digital media and children rages on. Recently, we responded to the controversial claim that ‘smartphones are destroying a generation’ by recognising that while teens’ mental health is indeed a concern, it is hasty to conclude that smartphones are solely to blame for a number of cultural and social shifts. Such media-panic is quite common, as with the Blue Whale Game controversy, or with the take-away message in Nancy Jo Sales’s hyperbolic book ‘American Girls’. While of course there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about child safety online, and a number of potential risks, our research tells us to be critical of extreme conclusions about digital media, and instead to focus on improving digital literacy and child-focused policy.

How parents, educators and governments can protect children’s rights to access and keep them safe is far from only a UK-question. Educators in Kenya and researchers in India considered how ‘eSafety’ looks in the context of highly unequal societies, and researchers in Turkey showed us how parents and children negotiate media decisions together – in contrast to parents in the US.

We have plenty more posts in the pipeline, including previews from our upcoming bookParenting for a Digital Future (to be published by Oxford University Press). As always, if you are interested in submitting a guest post, please see our editorial guidelines here.

This post gives the views of the authors and does not represent the position of the LSE Parenting for a Digital Future blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.